AWS Announces General Availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Aurora Serverless makes it easy and cost-effective to run
applications with intermittent or cyclical usage by auto-scaling
database capacity with per-second billing

Thousands of customers, including NTT DOCOMO, Cognizant, Pagely, CB
Insights, California Polytechnic State University, Currencycloud, and
CourseStorm took part in the preview, saving time and reducing the cost
of managing and operating database servers

August 09, 2018 08:10 PM Eastern Daylight Time

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:
AMZN), announced general availability of Amazon Aurora Serverless.
Aurora Serverless is a new deployment option for Amazon Aurora that
automatically starts, scales, and shuts down database capacity with
per-second billing for applications with less predictable usage
patterns. Amazon Aurora Serverless offers database capacity without the
need to provision, scale, and manage any servers. Aurora Serverless
brings the power of the MySQL-compatible database built for the cloud to
applications with intermittent or cyclical usage patterns without the
need to manage database servers. To get started with Amazon Aurora
Serverless, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora/serverless.

Many AWS customers have applications with intermittent or cyclical usage
patterns. For example, retail applications often experience seasonal
spikes. Development and test workloads require database access only at
certain times of the day or week. In addition, all new applications face
unknown usage demands. This creates a capacity planning dilemma for
customers who must either over-provision database capacity upfront to
pay for resources they will not use or under-provision resources and
risk performance problems and a poor user experience. With Amazon Aurora
Serverless, customers no longer have to provision or manage database
capacity. The database automatically and quickly starts, scales, shuts
down, and starts up again in seconds based on the needs of the workload.
Customers simply create an endpoint through the AWS Management Console,
and Amazon Aurora Serverless handles the rest. Customers pay by the
second for database capacity only when the database is in use. Amazon
Aurora Serverless brings the power of Amazon Aurora, the fastest growing
service in the history of AWS, to applications that only require
intermittent or cyclical database access at a fraction of the cost.

“More and more customers are moving production applications and
databases from Oracle and SQL Server to Amazon Aurora because it's a
highly available, highly durable, built-for-the-cloud database at one
tenth the cost of the older guard database offerings," said Raju
Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, at
Amazon Web Services. “With the availability of Aurora Serverless, we now
make it more cost effective for our customers to run intermittent or
cyclical workloads that have less predictable usage patterns such as
development and test workloads or applications that experience seasonal
spikes, making Aurora even more attractive for every imaginable
workload.”

NTT DOCOMO is the largest mobile service provider in Japan, serving more
than 73 million customers. “Our data-based services are often not used
at full capacity, resulting in high database running costs,” said
Tomoyoshi Ohno, Vice President and General Manager of Innovation
Management Department, NTT DOCOMO. “Amazon Aurora Serverless will allow
NTT DOCOMO to reduce operational costs by matching capacity to actual
demand. Because developers can use Amazon Aurora Serverless just like a
traditional MySQL database, it will be easy to adopt in our service
infrastructure."

Pagely is the WordPress hosting leader in innovation, speed,
scalability, and security, with thousands of clients ranging from the
largest tech companies, to universities, creative agencies, city and
state governments, and other large and midsize businesses. “We are
excited by the flexibility that Amazon Aurora Serverless offers in our
current managed WordPress hosting stack, and the new serverless
WordPress application hosting model that it enables us to pursue,” said
Joshua Strebel, Founder and CEO, Pagely. “Many of our large-scale
WordPress sites have unpredictable database usage. Amazon Aurora
Serverless gives us the ability to lower customer costs for these
fluctuating workloads and free internal resources by eliminating the
need for manual or monitored database resizing. Ultimately this is about
saving time, money, and serving our customers better, and Amazon Aurora
Serverless will help us do that.”

California Polytechnic State University is a nationally-ranked public
university that’s driven by its core philosophy of Learn by Doing — a
powerful combination of academic expertise and hands-on experience. “Our
Learning Management System (LMS) is central to the student experience at
Cal Poly, and we have high standards for performance, scalability and
high availability,” said Alison Robinson, Associate Vice President, Cal
Poly Information Technology Services. “Amazon Aurora meets our high
standards. Given LMS usage patterns, with peaks during the first week of
class, mid-terms, and finals, we expect to economize by paying only for
the resources we need when we need them and eliminating the need for
on-premises hardware. We also capitalize on the flexibility of the AWS
environment that allows us to automatically shut down development and
test instances when not in use, and spin them up quickly when needed.”

CB Insights is a private market intelligence firm that aggregates and
analyzes massive amounts of data and uses machine learning and data
visualization to help corporations answer strategic questions.
“Leveraging serverless computing is key to our system architecture
strategy at CB Insights as it allows us to handle bursts in computation
needs in an effective and cost efficient manner,” said Pal Hoye, Chief
Technology Officer of CB Insights. “We are excited about the opportunity
to bring the serverless model to databases through Amazon Aurora
Serverless. Through the preview program we have had early access to
Aurora Serverless and it has confirmed the applicability for
unpredictable data access scenarios. It’s also a good option for
development/staging databases, which can be shut down when not in use to
achieve additional cost savings.”

Cognizant is one of the world's leading business and IT services
companies, providing technology, consulting, and operations services to
help companies digitally transform their businesses. “The launch of
Amazon Aurora Serverless has been highly anticipated by the market,”
said Arun Varadarajan, Vice President, AI and Analytics at Cognizant.
“It complements several of our offerings, including Cognizant Adaptive
Data Foundation, a solution which enables the creation of cloud-based,
holistic data strategies requiring insights, scale and speed. Amazon
Aurora Serverless will enhance products like Cognizant Lab Insights, an
intelligent, connected lab performance management solution, because a
serverless database architecture supports the intermittent data usage
requirements of lab environments and provides better flexibility,
scalability, and cost-effectiveness.”

Amazon Aurora Serverless (MySQL-compatible edition) is available in US
East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and
Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and will expand to additional Regions in the
coming year.

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